“Yes?” Llandaff prompts.
Sir Joseph snaps to attention, focuses on Durfeys. “It’s all up, I’m afraid. Park has fallen into the hands of the Moors.”
♦ LIKE A CLOUD SWALLOWING
A FLOCK OF IBIS ♦
As Johnson limps through the gates of Segu Korro, trailing flies, a nag and an ass, a walking stick in his hand and a revitalized Eboe at his side, he is astonished to find the streets all but deserted. Windows shuttered, stalls left unattended, pack animals — still laden with swollen guerbas and panniers of produce — calmly dipping their heads into baskets of onions, yams and cassavas. A smithy’s forge sputters and roars beneath a spreading fig, lumps of wet clay harden in the sun beside finished pots. Tools lie where they’ve been dropped, goats call out to be milked, a monitor lizard, staked out for sale, stubbornly thrashes round and round its cord. From somewhere, the smell of burning bread. Johnson feels uneasy. It’s strange, eerie: like something out of a fairy tale. Red Rose and Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. When he spots a pair of eyes glaring out from behind a bamboo screen, he turns to Eboe. “What you suppose is goin’ on here?”
The old man, buoyant and oblivious, is strutting along like a teenager on his way to a dance. He stops in his tracks. “Going on?” he says, slapping Johnson’s back and exploding in a burst of harsh wheezing giggles. “It’s a holiday, is what it is. Wine, women and song.”
Johnson merely stares.
“Can’t you feel it?”
“Feels more like a cholera epidemic to me.”
Eboe winks. “Follow me,” he says.
They turn down a street lined with tamarind and raffia palm. The houses, built of whitewashed clay, are almost picturesque. There are patches of vegetables, trellises, even a flower or two. No paradise on earth, perhaps, but pleasant — very pleasant — all the same. It occurs to Johnson that this is the biggest town he’s seen since leaving London. Pisania was a sink compared to it, and Dindikoo, for all its charm, is just a hamlet in the sticks. Suddenly he finds himself thinking of sooloo beer — and mutton.
Round the next corner they stumble over a drunk stretched out in the road. “Baaaa,” says the drunk. “Urp.” Johnson bends over him, the guinea hen describing a wide arc and coming to rest, at a dangle, just under the drunk’s chin. “What’s goin’ on here?” Johnson asks.
The man looks up at him, eyes red, lips slack. “Drunk,” he mutters.
“No. I mean in the town. What’s goin’ on in this place? Where is everybody?”
“White,” slurs the drunk. “White as. “ he chokes off to tap his sternum and spit in the dirt. “White as a salted ghost. White, white, white. Like a cloud swallowing a flock of ibis.”
Johnson has begun to get the idea. “Where is he?”
“White as cotton, white as day. White as fangs and bones and moonlight in a clearing.” The drunk is sitting up now, his voice a nursery-school rhyme, vapid, singsong, endless and repetitive.
Johnson staggers up, breathing hard. The explorer is an innocent, a holy fool. They’ll cook him alive, crucify him. He’s got to find him. “Eboe!” he shouts, whirling around. “We got to find Mr. Park.”
But Eboe is already half a block away, standing stock-still, nostrils flared, snuffing the breeze. Then all at once he’s grinning and stamping, waving his arms like a juggler with nine plates in the air. “This way,” he motions. “Hurry!”
Johnson tugs at the leather strap, and nag and ass mechanically plod off at his heels. “White as teeth!” the drunk shouts. “Whiter than a dead mud turtle!”
Eboe drifts like a somnambulist, following his nose. Two blocks to the left, then back to the right, through the abandoned marketplace, down a street shabby with garbage and yellowed reed huts that could pass for outhouses. There are rats and snails in the gutters, snakes in the eaves. “Eboe!” Johnson calls, struggling to catch up, but the old man hurries on as if he hasn’t heard. The ground is soggy underfoot, banks of bamboo rise from between the huts now, birds flit through the trees. Finally the old man stops across from a sprawling, ramshackle hut propped up on stilts. Johnson, bringing up the rear, can make out the dim form of three or four women in the deep shade beneath the house. He is puzzled. He’d been under the impression that Eboe, recognizing the emergency, had been leading him to the explorer. Now he sees that he’s been misled.
Meanwhile, Eboe stands there, gazing into the shadows: still snuffing. The women are large, middle-aged at best. Their dugs are pendulous, gravid, balloons filled with water. If they can boast twenty teeth between them, they’re lucky. “Eboe!” shouts Johnson, but the women are doing fascinating things beneath their skirts, then holding up their fingers and licking them. The old necromancer can stand it no longer. He cracks a withered grin, gives Johnson the thumbs-up sign, and saunters into the shadows.
Johnson is stunned. Disappointed. Disgusted. Envious. He wants a beer, a plate of meat and rice, a woman, a bed. Here he is, a man of dignity and education, well past the age of retirement, a man with wives and children and a happy home — and what does he do? Wanders all over the continent, risking life and limb to bail out some half-witted, glory-hungry son of a crofter. He heaves a great wet sigh of despair and resignation, and turns to mount the balky blue ass, trying his level best to ignore the big flat-faced woman who dances out into the street and lifts her skirt for him.
♦ ♦ ♦
Fifteen minutes later (after following his hunches first, and then, as he draws closer, his ears), Johnson finally manages to locate the explorer. Emerging from a maze of narrow earthen streets into a sort of square fronting the riverbank, he is all at once confronted with an extraordinary scene. People — packed in like bees in a hive — as far as the eye can see. There must be three or four thousand of them, hanging from windows, treetops, roofs, perched on shoulders, the backs of camels, straining on tiptoe. The banks of the river are black with them, scores in water up to their ankles, knees, necks, scores more bobbing in pirogues and coracles. All gathered to stand hushed and appalled while this impossible, inexplicable presence, this man in the moon fallen to earth, this white demon from hell chants, screeches, laughs, gibbers and sings, churning up the water, cursing the crops, bringing the sky down, and who knows what else.
Johnson, lost somewhere in the rear of the press, steadies the blue ass and gingerly raises himself atop the washboard of its back until he is able to stand erect. From his eminence he can see the woolly expanse of four thousand heads. Closer to the river (the Niger — how about that? he thinks), the heads are more congested, like thick stands of papyrus reed. Way up front, just off the lip of a rickety bamboo dock, Mungo Park is kicking up a froth and singing “God Save the King” at the top of his lungs. The Bambarrans seem mesmerized, stunned — as silent and sober as the awestruck crowds that slowly filed past the bier of George II.